Expanding playoff will be big for Hurricane
Last Dec. 19, on a rainy, cold day in Cincinnati, the hometown Bearcats hosted the University of Tulsa in the American Conference championship game.
Much was on the line. A league trophy. A special season. A major bowl berth. Football bragging rights.
Cincinnati was 8-0 and ranked ninth by the College Football Playoff committee. Tulsa was 6-1 and ranked 23rd. The Bearcats won it 27-24, on Cole Smith’s final-play, 34-yard field goal.
But the game could have meant even more, had the 2020 season been conducted with the 12-team playoff that has been proposed for the future.
“To me, that’s the beauty of something like that,” TU athletic director Rick Dickson said of the 12-team playoff. “Whether it’s Tulsa or Cincinnati or Coastal Carolina or Boise State. Doesn’t matter.
“To say those type of teams couldn’t and shouldn’t be able to be in those lineups, that’s shortsightedness to think that couldn’t add something, just like it has in other sports.”
Dickson’s Golden Hurricane plays OSU on Saturday in Stillwater. The Cowboys beat TU 16-7 last season in a season opener that left OSU wondering how good it was. Instead, we should have been wondered how good was the Golden Hurricane.
“If this is adopted, it really eliminates all the damaging branding that’s gone on the last 20 years.”
Rick Dickson Tulsa AD, on College Football Playoff expansion
Tulsa won six straight after that, and had TU vanquished Cincinnati that rainy day, the Golden Hurricane would have zipped up the committee rankings. Probably into the No. 15 spot or thereabouts. Under the 12-team proposal, the six highest-ranked conference champions get automatic berths.
Tulsa — and Coastal Carolina of the Sun Belt Conference — would have been among the top six champions.
The 12-team proposal was scheduled for consideration by the playoff board of directors on Sept. 28. That likely has been delayed, courtesy of the Big Ten/ Atlantic Coast/Pac-12 alliance, which is wary of anything the Southeastern Conference does since news broke that OU and Texas will jump to the SEC.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was part of the four-man committee that produced the 12-team playoff, and the commissioners of the Pac-12, ACC and Big Ten were not. Hence the apprehension.
Dickson said he hopes the playoff pause is temporary.
“My sense is it’s a blowback directly at his (Sankey’s) participation” in the playoff proposal, Dickson said. “Hopefully it’s not more than that.
“The Big Ten was in favor of it. Obviously, it would benefit the Pac-12 and the Big 12, before all this happened, and all of us (mid-majors) as well. The first month it had been circulated, it was developing good momentum.”
It’s easy to understand why teams in conferences outside the anointed five would be supportive. The playoff has been a closed society since its 2014 inception. Four schools – Clemson, Alabama, OU and Ohio State – have accounted for 20 of the available 28 berths.
A program like Tulsa rarely competes for the American championship. A berth in the four-team playoff is an impossible dream.
But triple the field, and teams all over the landscape have hope. The Mountain West. The Mid-American. Conference USA. The Sun Belt. The American.
And should the 12-team proposal be adopted, Dickson sees more than just the playoff berth as a bonanza for college football mid-majors.“If this is adopted, it really eliminates all the damaging branding that’s gone on the last 20 years,” Dickson said.
That includes my use of mid-major. Dickson harkens back to the Bowl Championship Series, a two-team playoff enacted in 1998. The BCS included five bowls, with six conferences — the Big 12, SEC, Pac-10, Big Ten, ACC and Big East — designated as automatic-qualifying conferences.
The leagues quickly drew artificial designations — BCS leagues and nonBCS leagues. That has morphed these days into Power 5 conferences and nonPower 5.
Dickson was athletic director at Washington State of the Pac-12 in 1998 but had come from Tulsa and later would serve 16 years as AD at mid-major Tulane.
“If you were in either non-groups, your program non-deservedly faced bad branding,” Dickson said. “Had to prove that you were NOT something. That, to me, is the biggest damage that was created the last 20 years. You disenfranchised an entire group.”
Dickson noted that even the affluent conferences had members that “can’t and don’t compete, but they happen to be in a branded group that gave them privileges they hadn’t even contributed to.”
The schools and conferences on the wrong side of the power structure have occasionally fought back against such designations. American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco foremost among them.
“The American has been Power 6 all along and will be one moving forward,” Aresco told Sports Illustrated this week after it became apparent three of his schools — Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida — would join the Big 12.
But Aresco knows the truth. The haves/have-nots format didn’t change with implementation of the four-team playoff. In seven years, the highestranked mid-major in the committee’s final determinations has been Cincinnati, No. 8 last year.
Few have argued that the likes of Cincinnati or Tulsa or Central Florida would have a shot at beating Alabama or Clemson for a national championship. But plenty of teams have made the fourteam playoff without a realistic chance of winning the title. OU among them.
Dickson notes the history of the NCAA basketball tournament.
“If Gonzaga or Tulsa was good enough to recruit and develop a basketball team good enough to make the Final Four, you could,” Dickson said.
Then along came a football playoff, and the path was blocked.
“All of a sudden, it was you’re ‘not’ something, so you don’t have the opportunity or deserve the opportunity,” Dickson said. “This, to me, will be the first time in over 20 years we’ve created an opportunity for a reset.”
Tulsa’s chance for a playoff might not come this way again. But there are lots of Tulsas out there. Lots of Cincinnatis. Lots of teams tired of trying to prove they’re not something, ready to prove that they are.